Er, what's it do, then? Is it like a laser ("solution looking for a problem") or is it like a Swiss army knife or what?Cas

well lasers were the apocryphal 'solution looking for a problem' when they were first invented but since then they've turned up in millions of different consumer devices and have actually spawned entire industries and helped propel scientific advances that wouldn't have been possible without them, so if it does INDEED turn out to be 'like a laser' then I reckon sun ought to count themselves lucky :-)

Although, yes, I -do- find my swiss army knife considerably more useful than my laser pointer. Now if only someone would invent a suitably powerful little handheld laser 'cutting device'* of some description I'd be a happy man.

From the little hints that have been given I believe Project Darkstar is about a gaming server designed to scale in new ways. Multiple different games could be hosted by the same server. From some of the hints dropped around here It seems that Darkstar has the potential for smaller developers to pay for a small slice of a server to run their game without having to make the huge investment typically required to run a full online gaming community. That seems to fit into Sun's model of selling servers and supporting server-based services that can be resold by their direct customers.

I hope it does well and that Sun manages to get some big customers on board, because there is bound to be some spill-over to the client side once developers see the power of Java for the server-side of gaming.

Isn't Darkstar just another server?Doesn't Sun have millions of them already?Why is it that I'm always left out of the loop.

Darkstar is the PC term for a star that's not to bright. They used to be called Dwarf stars.

Soome defitions say that other definitions say its a black hole.

Either ofcourse leads to some pretty nasty minorly clever comments if you care to make them.AFAIAC as the Darkstar Architect, Dark Star is the name of John Carpenter's student film

Its also, I am told, the name of a classic Dead tune.

But aside from all that.

Project Darkstar is the project under which the Sun Game Server is beign developed. The Sun Game Server is a software technology designed to address many of the problems of developing massively scalable and persistant online game content tdoay. Project Darkstar goes beyond the server itself to address issues of deployment and administration of such content .

Beyond that, wait 2 weeks and we'll be able to talk a LOT more about it.

Got a question about Java and game programming? Just new to the Java Game Development Community? Try my FAQ. Its likely you'll learn something!

I am representing IMIlabs, a "first" developer with DarkStar for the launch of our debuting independant game at GDC.

Our experience has been excellent with DarkStar and it is working great right "out of the box".

It replaced our working but limited networking layer with very little changes to our existing system layered above (actually it was due to our system not been as layer as it should've been which was fixed with a few commented out code!)

We are mostly dealing with client to client networking (the game is cartoony combat racing) so throughput and latency are our most important factors, and all is well in our tests so far. I mention this because other traditional Java networking systems (not the raw nio.* stuff but other SE and enterprise stuff) simply are not built for this kind of usage pattern and introduce all kinds of complexities/dependencies and latencies that are not part of this gaming oriented API.

Wurm Online almost became a darkstar game long before I had any idea that's what it was called.But of course, sun always stopped talking to us when we asked "so when can we actually see this server thingie?".

Wurm Online almost became a darkstar game long before I had any idea that's what it was called.But of course, sun always stopped talking to us when we asked "so when can we actually see this server thingie?".

Hey, we *love* you guys. The fact of the matter is that up til now it really just wasn't ready for you.

Id say the GDC release is what we always wished we had to give you. And now we do.

I realie it might be a little late for Wurm, but there is always your next project.....

Got a question about Java and game programming? Just new to the Java Game Development Community? Try my FAQ. Its likely you'll learn something!

I'm sure they wanted to put it out long ago, but as I understand it's really an issue of allocated internal resources to get it primetime ready.Last year they got the go ahead to finish developing it into a product, it's unfortunate that it missed your dev window.Depending how work and how attached to your networking perhaps after GDC you can look at using it...

Wurm Online almost became a darkstar game long before I had any idea that's what it was called.But of course, sun always stopped talking to us when we asked "so when can we actually see this server thingie?".

Hey, we *love* you guys. The fact of the matter is that up til now it really just wasn't ready for you.

Id say the GDC release is what we always wished we had to give you. And now we do.

I realie it might be a little late for Wurm, but there is always your next project.....

Wooo! :-D

I have to say, I kinda started fearing you got your funding cut for the project. It's very nice (and cool) to hear it's actually happening.I can't wait to read some actual details on it. :-)

I am representing IMIlabs, a "first" developer with DarkStar for the launch of our debuting independant game at GDC.

Our experience has been excellent with DarkStar and it is working great right "out of the box".

It replaced our working but limited networking layer with very little changes to our existing system layered above (actually it was due to our system not been as layer as it should've been which was fixed with a few commented out code!)

We are mostly dealing with client to client networking (the game is cartoony combat racing) so throughput and latency are our most important factors, and all is well in our tests so far. I mention this because other traditional Java networking systems (not the raw nio.* stuff but other SE and enterprise stuff) simply are not built for this kind of usage pattern and introduce all kinds of complexities/dependencies and latencies that are not part of this gaming oriented API.

I have been following you guys (IMI) for a while. When will your game debut for those who will not attend GDC?

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